


Heard on the Battlefield

by inmylife



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Eurovision, Original Statement (The Magnus Archives), Statement Fic (The Magnus Archives)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-08
Updated: 2020-06-08
Packaged: 2021-03-04 05:48:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,833
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24598531
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inmylife/pseuds/inmylife
Summary: Statement of Evy Kine Madsen, regarding her performance at the Eurovision Song Contest.
Kudos: 4





	Heard on the Battlefield

**Author's Note:**

> shiloh, back at it again writing niche fic that appeals to them and like two other people
> 
> cw for a brief mention of hospitalization/injury and avatars being generally creepy, neither of those things are gone into detail just... know that they're there
> 
> also im american and dont actually know that much about eurovision lol let alone what the backstage process is like so i'm just guessing here

I’ve always loved the Eurovision. I was twelve the last time Denmark won, and there was a moment when I was watching that contest when I just decided that I wanted to do that. I had always loved singing anyway - my parents were both musicians, and it was something that was always in the house. So, basically, I tried to make a living out of music for a very long time. I kept mailing tapes to the Melodi Grand Prix, starting as soon as I was old enough, and that year I finally got accepted to compete. And I won. 

You have to understand that we were all shocked when the UK won. Forgive me, but… it’s always seemed like you’ve never taken the contest that seriously in recent years. And I guess I had hoped I’d go somewhere a little more, for lack of a better word, exotic, for my year, like Croatia or Portugal. But London would do. 

My song, um, it appeals to a lot of… certain imagery. Soldiers uniforms and playing pipes and drums, and the like. And I’m wearing this torn-up dress… it’s meant to look a lot like I’ve just stepped out of a war movie. 

There were five other people on stage with me. Henrik- right, you wanted full names, Henrik Avetisyan, Amanda Skovgaard, Edita Sedlacek, backup singers. They weren’t, they stayed offstage, out of sight of the camera. And then Erik Vanhanen and… Mads Antonis, who were both the onstage drummers. And Mads was the one playing the flute. 

We were all nervous, for exactly the normal reasons. This was the biggest crowd any of us had ever performed for, or even seen, in our entire lifetimes. The Estonian guy - he spoke damn good Danish, by the way - he was returning, and he said that it was just normal for everyone to feel nervous. Everyone wants to win. Everyone wants the public and the juries to like them. Everyone wants to bring the contest home. I certainly wanted to be the person to bring it back to Copenhagen. 

Yeah, so, we were nervous in the semi-final for all the predictable reasons. But we made it through! I got through, the Estonian guy got through, the Slovenian girl band who’d been really friendly at the pre-parties got through. I should have been happy. I should have been really excited. The whole rest of the delegation was. 

Well, I was happy for about five minutes there. Y’know how they have all the qualifiers parade up to the stage? I was standing on the stage, riding the high of qualifying, when I saw him. There was a guy in the audience, staring straight up at us. I don’t know if it was at me, at Simon from Macedonia who was right behind me, or at… well, I wasn’t sure at the time. But now I’m certain he was staring at Mads. It freaked me out, you know? More than it should have, I mean, loads of people’s eyes were on us, everyone in the audience really, and the cameras, and everyone watching at home. But there was something in this guy’s eyes that was really just terrifying. I mean, he was looking at us - Mads - like he hated him. 

He was holding a flute, too. One that looked just like the one in our stage performance.

And it just sent this awful, blood-churning fear into me. I think they caught it on camera, actually - the moment I saw it. You can see me looking out at the crowd, all happy, and then I gasp and I knock right back into the kid from Macedonia and we both ended up on the floor, and then the video quality got messy and they cut away to the other side of the stage. It really made me look like an asshole, but in the moment I didn’t care one bit. 

  
I was certain that if I performed in the final, someone was going to die. 

I didn’t know why I felt that way. I didn’t know what I could do to stop it. I just knew it. I felt it, heavy in my stomach, and not at all like stage fright.

I went about the days, though. How could I not? There were press releases to attend, interviews to be filmed, champagne to be had… [laughs]. I put on a face for it the whole time. I felt this awful dread that was… I can’t describe it any other way than, you know, this certain knowledge that so many people were going to die. 

Mads said he was going out for a bit, with some friends he’d met in some club last week, right before the final. Laura Lykke, our stage director, told him to just make sure he’d be back by call time. He promised he would be, and he was. Sort of. Mostly. 

When Mads came back to the venue, he was different. Not nervous at all. Said that everything was going to be perfect. He said “perfect” all funny. He said it in English, first of all, which isn’t that weird - we all speak English, and Henrik actually speaks it better than Danish so we used it to talk a lot. But he said it in such a strange accent. Mads had the thickest Danish accent of all of us when we used English, but now he was pronouncing it perfectly. He said it like he relished it. Like perfect was something to be feared. 

Of course this didn’t help my stage fright one bit. 

But I carried on. What else was I supposed to do? We were performing third, and it’s acts performing in the second half that usually win, so we all knew that we really had to bring it if we wanted to do well. I kept telling myself that I had nothing to be afraid of. After all, the jury rehearsal had happened without any problems. It was just stage fright, I said to myself. The pressure is just on. That’s all. 

Mads was grinning the whole walk from the green room to backstage. The whole time we were getting in place. It really didn’t help my nerves. Edita actually had to scold him, you know, because that grin really didn’t match the stage atmosphere we were trying to create. 

The lights went dark. The stadium speakers blared that weird noise meant to quiet down the audience, to signal that a performance was about to begin. And Mads raised that flute to his lips, and as the lights came up there was a split second before the opening notes began that I realized that something about the flute wasn’t quite right. It looked more handmade, it looked wrong. 

That’s when everything went to hell. 

It wasn’t my track that came out of the speakers. Not my track in my in-ears. I don’t have the words to describe it, really, but I’ll try. Grating, distorted, the drum rhythm was there but it was multiplied so heavily that it sounded like thousands of people playing it at the same time. I had never quite understood the phrase “made your ears bleed” until that moment. I started the performance sat on the stage, but I just collapsed, I lay down and I felt the LED screen hot against my cheek, and I knew that wasn’t right, it had always been cool but now it felt like it was overheating. Erik had his hands over his ears, one of the camera guys had sat down right at the edge of the stage. The audience… the audience was in a similar state. 

Above it all, I could still hear that flute music. But it wasn’t the right melody. It was quicker and spanned a greater range of notes. It truly sounded like something you might hear on a battlefield, not the stylized sequence we had. And it just kept going. 

Mads, he was… he was grinning the whole time, like this was exactly what he wanted. And when I lifted my head up, to get a look at the audience, I saw him. That man from the semifinal. He looked completely unaffected and he had that same look of glee on his face. 

I don’t know what happened. I guess someone backstage thought to turn off the audio in the venue entirely. It seemed to work. All the music, the noise, it just stopped. 

I’m told that none of that ever showed up on the broadcasts or streams. Apparently all the cameras picked up was static, and then everyone cut to commercial or the broadcasting company’s logo. 

The stagehands had to usher us offstage. The host went out to apologize for the technical difficulties. They told our delegation that our backing track had been corrupted, so the supervisors had made the decision to substitute our semi-final performance in the broadcast and use that instead. I was fine with it. I didn’t want to go on stage again. 

The official story is that the audio and video went out around the same time due to a bug. Big embarrassment to the host broadcaster and everything. The fact that twenty people had to be hospitalized from sudden wounds was never released. I think they had the audience sign an NDA; the only reason I know is because the Estonian guy saw firsthand what was happening. He had a clear view of the audience from his place in the green room and I guess he thought I should know. 

Mads didn’t come back to the green room with us. Laura got a text from him the next day saying that he wouldn’t be returning to Denmark, that he had met someone in London that he would be staying with. I don’t know where he went. I didn’t see. I didn’t see that man in the audience again either. I didn’t really come back to myself until the Slovenian performance fifteen minutes later.

We placed fifteenth. Fine by me. I didn’t want to do well anymore. Didn’t want to have to perform the song again. 

I gave up on music after that. I went back to school and got an art history degree and now I work as a tour guide. I never really wanted to talk about this again, or to go back to England, even, but my partner’s sister moved here and they wanted me to meet her, so here we are. One of their in-laws offhandedly mentioned the Magnus Institute a few days ago and I just knew I had to talk about this to someone. I don’t talk to anyone else who was on stage with me anymore, and I do keep up with the Macedonian kid but he just wants to forget about it. But I need someone to know this is real. I need someone to know that this happened. Even if it is a dingy little basement library in a country I’ll never come to again. 

**Author's Note:**

> so the performance described here is essentially just [only teardrops](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p3f9v8ebuD4) but i feel weird about writing rpf for something like this so it's Heavily Fictionalized Not Actually Emmelie De Forest who's giving the statement
> 
> i made a joke about "ha ha, piper, war imagery, emmelie de forest is an agent of the slaughter" and then this happened 
> 
> also, i'm on [tumblr](https://deep-hearts-core.tumblr.com/)!


End file.
